I’d been using ZFS with Void linux on both my laptop and desktop for a couple of months. And ZFS is cool! But I’m thinking not great for my use case, especially for my laptop with it’s more constrained resources. Memory usage was a real problem, even after imposing low ARC limits. And the kernel module compile time was long enough to be a bit annoying, especially for a few kernels (I like to keep the last few around, to be safe) as it happens fairly often on a rolling release.

I switched the laptop to LUKS/btrfs a couple of days ago. And I’m thinking that was the correct choice for that. And now I’m considering doing the same for my desktop. As they seem comparable but btrfs is in-kernel and seemingly more system resource friendly. But before doing so I figured I’d ask the community about it. Maybe some important factors or features for either setup that I might not be considering.

Here’s the stuff I care about. All of which both offer, but I’m not an expert at either and I don’t know how equal they are.

  • Disk encryption. For ZFS everything (except the EFI partition) is encrypted. I use ZFSBootMenu in this scenario. For the btrfs setup I have the kernel/initramfs on an ext2 partition. I do not store any decryption keys in the initramfs. I know grub can decrypt LUKS with limitations, but I prefer this setup. And it feels secure enough to me. Any pitfalls I’m missing?
  • Pools/subvolumes
  • Snapshots. ZFSBootmenu has an option to load a snapshot. For btrfs it looks like I’d need to create a subvolume from a snapshot, which in a recovery situation might mean doing this from recovery media. That’s ok, given this is an unlikely thing to encounter. But if anyone knows of an easier way, I’d love to hear it.
  • CoW
  • RAID 1
  • Compression is nice, especially for the laptop

Edit: typo in title.

  • JovialSodiumOP
    2·
    1 day ago

    Your comment as well as @stupid_asshole69@hexbear.net were really food for thought for me. stupid_asshole69 advising against, and yours as a cautionary tale.

    This would be a complex stack to accomplish my goal. It occurs to me that it’d be mdadm (raid 1) > LUKS > btrfs since btrfs can’t do encryption which is right in the middle of that stack, so I couldn’t use it’s raid 1 functionality. If any of those pieces break, all the protection they would have otherwise provided me goes out the window.

    And I’m not really worried about losing data. I already backup my personal files and most of my configs. The appeal with this kind of setup is the data redundancy and fairly quick recovery. But a partition clone like what saved you also works pretty well for that purpose. I don’t know what I’ll do just yet, but definitely taking all that in to consideration.